


Ring of Clover

by link621



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: F/F, F/M, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-20
Updated: 2005-09-20
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:07:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/link621/pseuds/link621
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story that will never be told of a woman betrothed, her fiancee, and her partner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ring of Clover

She already thought it was a cliché way to begin telling her story, even before the words left her fingers, tapping over clicking plastic squares on the keyboard and generating words on the screen; mere characters to poorly represent exactly the macabre she had witnessed in the weeks leading up to her breaking point – the moment when if she did not get it out of her system, she would become entranced, as though with the dancing heads of deformed human shapes in off-mustard, peeling wallpaper that perpetually reeked of mildew.  
  
 _It all began when…_  
  
Four words that could only begin an epic of over-dramatic proportions; she had not even yet introduced the conflict that had generated the need to write down her thoughts in the first place, her fingers once again lightly rapping the keys as one leg crossed over the other, her robe slipping away from pale skin like the sea silently receding from the shore in the moonlight. This was the only time she could write – this midnight hour, her body uncomfortably stiff and unclean from the still-drying trails of sweat that followed her spine to her buttocks, soaking into the thin dressing robe.  
  
Her eyes darted away from the screen, glancing back to the nude form on the futon, basking unknowingly in the glow of the moon; her every curve alight with an eerie almost-blue glow, like the color of the sky on a foggy morning, sweat hanging like dew from the tips of dyed red hair and congealing in the pool of her lower back. The shadows were more alluring than the light, masking the fleshy peak of lips, gently parted against the soft cotton of the pillow case – the malleable flesh of her chest pressed against the sheets, compelling her body upward with each expansion of her ribcage as she inhaled.   
  
This may have been her only moment to tell the story – by morning, all would be lost – but there was certainly a stronger drive to curl up against a second supple body, twining together limbs in a slow-motion dance before their fingers, lips, and tongues could find the places that would bring a now-familiar cry from the redhead and panicked, pleasured gasps from her older partner. By morning, the older girl would be back in the arms of the only one who would know of her infidelity – her duty to society once again put on the forefront. Her fingers gravitated naturally away from the keyboard, wanting instead to weave into red hair – like straw to the touch from sweat – and learn every small curl and flip – every highlight – before forever letting go.  
  
She backed up a step in her document – it was always best to start from the beginning, or so said yet another cliché. The beginning, of course, in this case, was the end – she would have to state the end so that her justification would be just that – a justification.   
  
 _I had always assumed the touch of another woman would be much like self-pleasure. A woman should know, intuitively – instinctively – perhaps from experience, where to touch… how to touch. Unlike the clumsy, unfeeling, rough fingers of a man, she should be able to find that one spot at the base of my neck where the hair is a little shorter and stimulate it just the right way – her hands should be gentle with my breasts, her lips knowing of the patch of skin at my hipbone that twitches as muscles tighten to her will. As I could with my own hand – my own fingers – she should find that one point inside me, warm and slick, that clenches the muscles of my abdomen and brings unwarranted tears to my eyes as I gasp and groan around the building pressure in my throat – wanting to climax, wanting to delay the pleasure. She will know, as intuitively as I, that a woman can have many such peaks in one night – that pleasuring a woman is not a brief experience. It does not take fifteen minutes – it could take all night. She will be my hand, but at the same time something so much better than hand or man.  
  
She would be my lover.  
  
I’ve been reassured many times that an adolescent fixation with sexuality is completely normal – as I understand it, a shockingly high percent of women do consider or pursue a relationship with another woman… especially at “my age” or a little bit older. We just don’t talk about it; we can’t talk about it. “Experimentation,” or so it’s called – it’s supposed to be a healthy part of natural female development into sexual womanhood. This experimentation does not even make us, as women, necessarily homosexual or bisexual – many women who go on to be supposedly straight have at least locked lips with another of the same sex.   
  
Sexuality is an organic thing – it shifts and changes and sometimes bends to the will of the heart, but it will not bend to the will of the mind; just hide suppressed and aching until you feel like you’re going to explode – you have to have him inside you, you have to explore her on the inside – sometimes all it is you need is a touch or a kiss; sometimes that is the very fuse of the explosion, burning down ever faster with every casual glance or accidental brush of the fingers. It has nothing to do with attractiveness – attraction, love, they have nothing to do with something that could be so logically defined as attractive or not attractive… and neither can sexuality. Even love is not so nicely clean-cut.  
  
I suppose I loved him, to begin with – I loved him with the wide, accepting arms of a child, embracing a brother or close friend, but feeling completely willing and secure to let go. Adults can’t do that, anymore – they need a ring; else they think they’re going to let go. Not a child – a child trusts that he will be there in the morning to walk her to school, and he will be there after school to meet her at the tennis courts – he will be there to walk her home or to come over for dinner. He will help her with her homework… and sometimes, she’ll be the one who will help him. They run homemade kites across the field in the park until it has enough lift to stay aloft – they join hands and walk unblushingly down the line of booths at the festival, one smiling, one disaffected. They can do this all without a ring, because he will always be there with her.  
  
My parents – his parents – adults… they can’t think this way. They need a ring to solidify it in their mind – a binding union of man and wife to secure the pact made between two traditional families for the well being of both. So it was, I became betrothed to the boy to whom I had already become engaged one early summer afternoon with a white clover flower tied in a loop, slid over my finger with what was my first kiss. First of many kisses – kisses that held friendship, love, passion – but always, he reserved his softest, friendliest kisses for sitting in the clover patch, holding my hand, tilting his head just so the sunlight caught in his glasses and I could no longer see his eyes of chocolate brown.  
  
The captain of the men’s tennis club with the captain of the women’s tennis club – it seemed like a match made in heaven, often the talk of the local magazine that followed the progress of our secondary school throughout the years. I remember well the first time he saw me, dressed in the uniform, his eyes falling upon my figure as though he had never known me to be a girl before that moment – he had taken me to the clovers, again, that day and made me promise we would both take our respective teams – our school – to the Nationals tournament together. He kissed me, then – a new sort of kiss… that passionate kiss that I learned then could melt my knees faster than ice in hell, his tongue declaring to me with soft strokes what exactly he would like to make of our relationship as he rolled me onto my back, my skirt falling away from my thigh as my leg angled around his knee.  
  
He was not what I could have anticipated as a man – he was soft, surprisingly, where I thought all men would be rough and unbridled. Still, his understanding of my body was a growing thing, developing ever closer to something euphoric with every stroke and every thrust. Love, a dynamic thing, was already changing to match his passion; words that had been spoken about us were coming true – words that we were “in love” and that we were “well matched” came into fruition below his sculptor’s hands.  
  
Power – charisma – command… those were the sorts of things others valued in him. I valued the more subtle side – he was much like a flower with a powerful stem and a closed bud, but I knew where to find the delicate petals – I knew how to care for him. That was something he would show no one else – it was how he became the number one in singles in the country – commanding his own space, taking no prisoners… retreating into my arms in moments of despair to let me mend the delicate tears in blooming petals.  
  
I was a healer – I was a supporter, by nature, so I pursued doubles, instead. I went through so many partners – so many faces of girls with eyes that had been so many different colors and hair in so many different styles that they all eventually started to look the same – their names could have been anything, blending into a blur of white noise while I looked for the perfect fit – the girl who could be my left hand. I found her rather unconventionally.  
  
A glossy magazine between my fingers, I waked absently in the direction that I knew, vaguely, to be school as I looked over an article about my team. I had made the photo at the head of the article – twin black braids bouncing against my shoulders as I served high above my head; long legs barely covered in a traditional tennis skirt and socks pulled up to my knees. I wore the starter jersey I had also been awarded in junior high – from the twist of my body for the serve, my arm hid the name of the school scrolled across my left breast. In pictures, I’ve noticed, my eyes always look black – never green. My waist is thin, my breasts modest… but I’ve had my fair share of attention from the male crowd beyond that one particular person.   
  
Blue is not my color.  
  
Suddenly something very heavy and very mobile collided with me from behind. She was shorter than me; I registered, as I helped the other girl right herself after the collision. The school skirt hit her at a more reasonable length, though judging from her wildly dyed hair (there was simply no way she was a natural redhead), she was not the sort of girl who became too worked up over things like the length of her skirt. Her socks are rolled over, her hair curled at the ends, and she wears a minimal amount of make up – enough that I know she is wearing it. There is a flower-shaped clip in her hair, and she smells like chrysanthemum. My eyes strayed over full, gloss-slick lips for longer than I could have intended before meeting her eyes – a shade away from blue, and two steps short of lavender.  
  
It all began when I met Eiko, my doubles partner – my left hand._  
  
She highlighted the entirety of the text she had just typed, her finger compelling the mouse upward – sometimes catching a word or a phrase that branded itself in her brain – scorching a mark on her mind’s eye so she could not forget what she had been thinking that night, even though the world would. She tapped the backspace key, watching pages of text disappear in an instant – pausing briefly to consider undoing the last command and recovering all of her treacherous thoughts about the feel of a woman – the thoughts that made her eyes stray once more the futon where, bare, her partner lay.   
  
Come morning, she would tie a clover of platinum around her finger, kissing lips that had known hers so passionately and loved her so deeply since she had learned how to love.   
  
Thoughts of gold and platinum – white, doves, passion, kisses, and forever – those thoughts were discarded as she closed the word processor on her computer, and let the robe drop away from her shoulders, pooling at her feet as she returned to the futon beside her partner, waking the redhead with the sudden presence. She was greeted with a kiss that was soft – it was nothing more than swollen flesh against flesh; dry and chapped, but with the second attempt, she wet her lips. The third she wet the lips of her partner. On the fourth, they had whet their appetite for something that was wordlessly conveyed when their eyes met in the silver glow of the moon – something that involved hands that knew the female body intimately.  
  
Still, her thoughts drifted as she proved to her doubles partner all she had learned, already, from their too-brief lovemaking that had only recessed long enough for her to write a story that would never be told.  
  
 _Tezuka Shuuko_ , she thought. Really, it had a nice ring to it.


End file.
